Ok, so I posted an extension on my last thread, about Golanth rescuing Binness, and the timing that went on. I was wondering... Does timing mess anyone else's head up? The minute I read the words "timing it" it starts my head spinning.

Anything with time travel in it can have that effect. Luckily for us, Pernese timing it always results in a Stable Time Loop. Even if it's a ridiculously complicated loop like in Todd's books following the Dragon Plague Crisis. Seriously though, we should at least give him props for having kept track of what went when and where in such a tangle of time jumps.

The extension on the post (which I deleted now, having started a new thread for it), was about why Golanth bothered to time it back a few seconds to avoid the tsunami. I think he could have just done a straight teleport between instead.

Then again, if they'd done that, they would have missed the tsunami itself crashing on the cliffs, and they could have come out of between in the middle of the wave. Looking back, it was certainly the safest thing to do. Even if it messed me up a bit. Thoughts?

Pernese time travel is not TOO bad. (Though somewhere I have a half-finished story, inspired by another fic on the same theme, about what Capiam and Desdra were doing the day when they reached the same day they'd gone to Ista in the "future", where there are two Desdras, Oklinas, Capiams, B'lerions, Alessans, and Nabeths and Moreta was for one day "alive" again, which brings up some of the questions of Pernese time travel-they can't go because they know they didnt, but that's why they're not going, so how do they KNOW it can't work.)

In a snippet of Dragonsblood I read, a holder girl asks a dragonrider about how he knows you can't go somewhere you've never been. He answers that when he tried to give his dragon directions to change a past event that the two had never been at, he couldn't picture it clearly enough in his mind. His dragon adds that "A dragon cannot go to a place that is not. It is like trying to fly through rock."

In a snippet of Dragonsblood I read, a holder girl asks a dragonrider about how he knows you can't go somewhere you've never been.

Quote:

He answers that when he tried to give his dragon directions to change a past event that the two had never been at, he couldn't picture it clearly enough in his mind. His dragon adds that "A dragon cannot go to a place that is not. It is like trying to fly through rock."

Except it doesn't really work as an excuse--in Moreta, they leap to the FUTURE, in DF they jump through times none of them existed in. They don't need to see the people (if they needed to be THAT precise no one would be able to between in regular time as you'd never have an exact picture of absolutely everything at your destination-sure, I have a general idea of what, say, Igen looks like, but do I know exactly what dragon is on watch or whether a wheelbarrow is parked by the feeding pens this instant?) or know absolutely everything about the surroundings. Lessa had enough of a reference with changes to the buildings, B'lerion only needed a star chart and Moreta's general idea of what Ista looked like in spring. And in the great leap forward, they went entirely by star charts as neither Lessa nor the Oldtimers had any idea what the Weyrs looked like in the intervening years SPECIFICALLY. All you'd need to time to a 'when' you'd never been, unless it's a totally unknown place, is the right star or sun positions. Heck, without that F'nor couldn't have taken the Weyrlings back ten turns, even having been South with Lessa. They didn't know what was going on where they were going ten turns prior.

Whatever. The general point stands. Every other time travel has not relied on perfect FIRST HAND knowledge of the destination. Suddenly requiring it doesn't work with previous Anne-canon. All you need is *a* reference, not necessarily a first-hand reference (again, in Moreta they go FORWARD to a time by definition they can't have seen specifically, and the long jumps forward in DF are entirely on the basis of star positions as they have no way of knowing details about the conditions of the Weyrs during the times they stop in until they get there.)